Applied narratology. Theory, Methods, and Analysis of Social and Political Narratives: How Stories Shape Power, Identity, and Reality
- -
- 100%
- +
And here a revolution occurs.
The Narrative Therapy of White and Epston (1980s—1990s)
The first formal method of rewriting a story. Michael White and David Epston uttered a phrase that changed everything: ‘The problem is not the person. The problem is the story that governs the person.’ They proposed a method: externalise the problem, give it a name, see what it does, gather alternative stories, begin to live a new version.
This was truly a revolution. The tasks this approach addresses are reducing the influence of destructive stories and replacing them with sustainable ones; stabilising the emotional field; providing a language for one’s own identity; restoring a sense of authorship over one’s life. This is the most humanistic of all approaches, working with what is too frightening to voice. Therapy, for the first time, began to see in the individual an ‘author’, not just a patient.
But there was a key limitation: narrative therapy works with pain, not with development, leadership, or life strategy. Nevertheless, this is where the ‘applied understanding of story’ begins.
However, applied narratology went further, into coaching, where it began to be applied as a strategy for personal growth. The modern world presupposes not a ‘standard biography’, but a ‘project of one’s own life’. And in coaching, narrative became a full-fledged tool for choosing a role; defining a future version of oneself; creating a development scenario; shaping directed behaviour; transitioning from chaos to a clear line.
Applied narratology then carried these ideas beyond therapy and coaching – into business, culture, education, leadership, strategy, and public communication.
Leaders and Corporations: Narrative as a Tool for Influence and Transformation
Companies and corporations understood something important: people are motivated not by salary, but by meaning. A team is held together not by KPIs, but by a shared plot. Change happens not through instructions, but through a story explaining why it is necessary. Companies create mission narratives, change narratives, culture narratives, leadership narratives, team role narratives. Narrative became the ‘fuel’ of corporate identity.
In this area, applied narratology became a tool for strategic communications, change management, culture building, conflict resolution, and team formation. A leader without a clear narrative is a manager around whom there is no direction.
In organisations, specialists saw the same mechanisms: every company lives within a story about itself. This story answers the questions: who are we as a team; what matters to us; what do we avoid; how do we explain our successes and failures; what goals do we aspire to.
If the corporate narrative is outdated, organisations stall in their development, even if strategies are correctly formulated. If the narrative is renewed, change proceeds more easily and quickly.
A leader who masters narrative technology influences not only people’s actions, but also the meaning within which those actions are performed.
Applied Narratology in Education: Learning Through Meaning and Plot
Modern pedagogy has shifted from the transmission of information to the creation of educational stories, developmental trajectories, game-based learning scenarios, project cycles, and ‘student journeys’. Because what is remembered is the ‘story’, not the ‘data’. If a course or lesson is a plot, the brain itself constructs causality and motivation. The student receives not information, but a scenario along which they move. This sharply increases motivation and understanding.
Media and Digital Identity: Story as Self-Presentation and a Tool for Influence
In essence, social networks have already made every person the editor, director, author, and hero of their own story. This has amplified the narrativity of the digital world, where stories are micro-plots, a blog is a long-term story, a post is a claim for interpretation, an avatar is a symbolic version of the ‘I’, a comment is part of a speech plot, and any likes are social support for the story. Applied narratology in this area studies how digital versions of the self are formed, how story affects self-esteem, how algorithms reinforce certain plots, how digital traumas are created through interpretations, and how a social image begins to govern the real.
Social and Political Narratology: A Tool for Managing Society and the New Role of Meaning Architects
Narrative is not only about individuals; it is about countries. Every state lives within a story of freedom and justice, prosperity and struggle, pain and rebirth. Political movements are narratives, protest movements are other narratives, social conflicts are clashes of plots. And applied narratology works here as a powerful tool. It analyses collective myths, predicts societal reactions, designs new symbols and meanings, reduces tensions, and creates unifying stories. This is already the level of state strategy.
Social processes today require specialists capable of working with collective stories as precisely as engineers work with structures. Politicians, state communicators, cultural institutions – all of them create, adjust, and transmit narratives. For example, how does society perceive the idea of justice; what image of the future is offered to it; how are crises interpreted; what values become shared; how are success, responsibility, and freedom explained?
Applied narratology provides tools that allow working with these large meanings without manipulation and without pressure – through the honest management of perceptual frameworks.
The Main Task of Applied Narratology
Despite its many directions, the discipline rests on four fundamental principles.
– Story governs behaviour. People do not act in reality; they act in their versions of reality. For example, two people receive a promotion. One says: ‘They appreciated me’; the second says: ‘They want to burden me even more because I’m convenient.’ One is happy. The other is disappointed. The event is the same, the stories are different, the behaviour is opposite.
– A story can be changed. This is the most revolutionary idea. A story is not a given, but a construction. And since it was created, it can be created anew. But not through fantasy, through structural work.
– A new story requires actions. This is the main filter of applied narratology. If a person says, ‘I’m starting a new life,’ but takes no steps, this is not a story. It is a wish. A story is what is confirmed by actions.
– A story must be sustainable. A new story must correspond to resources, align with values, be realistic, take the environment into account, be stable, and rest on inner truth. Applied narratology does not create heroic fantasies. It creates workable life plots. Hence the high standard of ethical work for narratologists.
An applied narratologist is not an observer. They are a specialist who helps an employee or a company move from one internal construction to another – more accurate, more realistic, more alive.
Why is Applied Narratology a Discipline of the Future?
There are three reasons why it is becoming a key practice of the twenty-first century.
– We live in a world of rapid change. Individual biographies have become less linear: a person changes profession, lifestyle, and field of activity several times. Every change is preceded by a transformation of the story: ‘Who am I now? What matters to me? Where am I going?’ The narratologist helps navigate these transitions consciously.
– Strategies cease to work without meaning. Organisations can no longer rely on old management models. Teams need a shared language, a shared explanation of what is happening. This is narrative – a clear and honest story that unites people.
– Society needs clear interpretations. In an era of information overload, narrative becomes not a tool of propaganda, but a tool of navigation. People need to understand how to interpret the reality in which they find themselves.
How Does Applied Narratology Work in Practice?
Applied narratology works at the intersection of three things: understanding, meaning, and action. It does not offer simple solutions. It creates a space where a person can transform their internal logic so that their life becomes more meaningful and manageable. Applied narratology is a discipline that works not with illusions, but with possibilities.
It does not promise easy changes, but it gives individuals and systems the main thing: the right and the tools to be the authors of their own story. In a world where facts change faster than a person can comprehend them, narrative becomes the primary navigational tool.
And the one who knows how to work with it gains not control over reality, but the ability to navigate within it.
PART THREE
CHAPTER 1. WHAT IS NARRATIVE
Narrative is not a form of storytelling, but a form of thinking.
David HermanA person rarely realises that for most of their life, they act based on their interpretation of reality. We react not to facts, but to the meanings we have assigned to those facts. Facts happen quickly, stories remain for a long time – and it is they that shape destiny. The French historian Jacques Le Goff wrote that a country’s history is not only its documents, but also the collective myths that society passes from generation to generation. In exactly the same way, a person lives within the mythology of their own experience.
When we say ‘narrative’, we mean not a literary device, but a hidden structure of consciousness, a mechanism that connects past, present, and future into a unified story.
In France, for example, this mechanism is particularly evident, because the country itself lives within powerful historical narratives:
– the narrative of freedom (the Great Revolution),
– the narrative of dignity (de Gaulle and the Resistance movement),
– the narrative of style and uniqueness (culture, fashion, philosophy),
– the narrative of trauma (occupation, defeats, wars),
– the narrative of rationality (the Enlightenment),
– the narrative of revolt (May 1968).
These plots have shaped the behaviour of society for centuries. And the same thing happens at the level of the individual. To understand a person, you need to understand the story they tell about themselves. To change them, you need to change that story.
A person thinks they live in events. But they live in stories. Events are short, stories are long. Events are chaotic, stories are coherent. Events are neutral, stories are meaningful. And most importantly: events affect us less than the stories we tell about them. Narrative is the way a person explains everything. It is the structure in which they seek meaning. It is the framework of identity. It is the reality that everyone chooses – consciously or not. If until now we have examined the three schools of narratology, we now descend a level further – to the phenomenon itself and its mechanism.
The History of the Term
The term ‘narrative’ (from the Latin narrare – to tell) is generally used to denote a recounting of interconnected events in the form of a sequence of words or images, or both. The difference between narrative and story is that a story is a sequence of events based on the actions of its characters, possessing a plot, a storyline, and characters. Narrative, on the other hand, is a particular way of presenting that story and includes the story itself.
The term ‘narrative’ was introduced from historiography and, in particular, from the concept of so-called ‘narrative history’. According to this concept, historical events are viewed not as the result of the regularities of some processes, but in the context of their description, in direct connection with their interpretation. Contexts and interpretations are the foundation of this approach to exposition, because through them one can introduce subjective meaning into history without distorting facts and actions, and include in the narrative that which changes their perception and the consequences of their telling. Consequences are ideas, actions, conclusions. Thanks to interpretations in a narrative, the entire multitude of interwoven events, facts, and actions are subordinated to the goal, the causality of the narrative – to what is called meaning.
People tell stories in the form of sequences of words, which they construct into operative images and processes. This sequence can be viewed not only as a succession of the events themselves, which are the result of certain processes, but also as the context for describing these events. In other words, to present their interpretation: how a person relates to this story, how they tell it, and for what purpose.
Recently, under the influence of English-language political science, in many languages and media, the term ‘narrative’ has acquired an additional meaning – ‘an utterance that contains a world-view stance or a prescription.’ This is actually a rather candid formulation. Especially the term ‘prescription’.
But what is narrative if we give it not an academic, but a generally accessible definition? Narrative is a way of organising experience into a story with causality, emotion, and meaning. It is a way of connecting events into a story that explains to a person who they are, what is happening to them, and why their life has its particular form. It is not decoration – it is the structure through which the brain understands what is happening. The formula for narrative is simple: narrative = events + interpretation + meaning and purpose.
A fact in itself does not become part of a person. It becomes part of a person only when they explain it thus: ‘This happened because I am like that,’ ‘This always happens to me,’ ‘This is no accident,’ ‘This is about me.’
– Narrative is not what we experienced. It is what we decided about our experience. The fact is brief. The interpretation is enduring. It is this that becomes a support or a trap.
– The same experience can give rise to different lives: a poor childhood can become a story of being unwanted, a story of survival, or a story of constantly proving one’s own worth. The fact is one – the narratives are different.
– It is also important to distinguish between close but different concepts:
– tale/account – the verbalisation of experience;
– plot – the sequence of events;
– memory – the storage of data;
– narrative – the emotional-meaning structure through which a person explains life to themselves.
For example, a job rejection: fact – rejection; plot – preparation, interview, result; narrative – ‘I’m always rejected because I’m not good enough.’ The event does not change – life changes. Narratives exist in all spheres of activity.
Event: a person moves to a new city. Account: ‘I changed my place of residence.’ Plot: ‘I quit my job, packed my things, left.’ Narrative: ‘I’m running from the past’ or ‘I’m seeking freedom,’ or ‘I finally chose myself.’ One event – different lives.
Why Does a Person Need Narrative?
There are four fundamental needs that narrative satisfies better than any other method of thinking.
– The need for meaning. If life does not form a story, a person feels emptiness. Narrative answers: why I live, why everything happens this way, why my path is this particular one, what makes my experience meaningful. Meaning is always the result of a story. Meaning is the connective tissue with which consciousness binds experience.
– The need for causality. The brain cannot tolerate chaos. A person cannot live in chaos. They must know, ‘Why did this happen to me?’ Even a false explanation is better than no explanation – it still reduces anxiety.
– The need for identity. ‘Who am I?’ is not a philosophical question. ‘Who am I?’ is not a biological fact. It is a story. The French writer Marguerite Duras observed: ‘Personality is the version of events that a person has chosen to keep.’ This is a matter of narrative. A person is not a set of qualities. They are the story they tell about themselves. This story already determines what I can do, what I cannot do, what I am worthy of, how others treat me, what I am permitted, and what my limit of possibilities is.
– The need for predictability. Narrative creates a system of expectations: ‘If I tell the truth, I’ll be judged,’ ‘If I show weakness, I’ll be rejected,’ ‘If I work hard, I’ll be noticed.’ The story sets expectations: can I be loved? can I be successful? can I be free? does failure await me? A person builds their life to fit their own story.
Narratology, in turn, has made it possible to unify narratives and, in the most general terms, systematise the rules for their creation. As we already know, a text in narratology is studied from two perspectives: on one hand, it is the story itself in the form of its content and events; on the other, it is the form of the narrative, its plane of expression.
But within the narrative itself, there is also a third plane, a plane based on the first two: on content and form. This plane determines the direction of the story, its targeted communication, as well as the correspondence of the form to the images and words used in the narrative, to its goals and meanings.
The creation of stories has always been a kind of ‘creation of yet another reality’, another permissible model of the world. A narrative is not a description of this model, but rather an instruction that explains this reality and shows how to act within it.
By studying and analysing narratives, one comes to understand that events, characters, and their actions may not be the root cause of what is happening, and that the entire story is built on an idea introduced into it, on its meaning. The irony is that ‘narrative bias’ is an integral part of narrative thought.
Examples of well-constructed narratives are the promises of presidential candidates and Andersen’s fairy tales, the parables of Solomon and the history of a state in a school textbook. And what can teach a person better than their own life and its stories? Only other, professionally crafted stories.
We can say that narrative is the way a person gives form and meaning to experience. But this definition is insufficient to understand exactly how it works, which particular story is currently governing their perception, decisions, and actions.
Any living story is not structured chaotically. It has an internal logic, roles, tensions, a rhythm, and anchor points. To see why some stories hold a person for years while others fall apart, it is necessary to analyse narrative not as an abstraction, but as a structure.
This is precisely what we now turn to.
CHAPTER 2. THE LAYERS OF NARRATIVE: PERSONAL, FAMILIAL, SOCIAL, CULTURAL
The brain is not an instrument of truth, but an instrument of survival.
Donald HoffmanA person does not live within a single narrative. They live within a system of stories that overlay each other, intertwine, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes contradicting each other. These stories shape not only how they understand themselves, but also how they perceive the world, make choices, and act.
When a person says, ‘It’s just my life,’ they rarely realise that their life has already been interpreted. It has already been assembled into a narrative. And this narrative consists of several layers.
Four Layers of Narrative
A personal narrative is the story about oneself. Who am I? What am I entitled to? What is forbidden to me? What am I afraid of? What do I want and aspire to? This is the most emotionally charged layer. Here live shame and pride, confidence and doubt, a sense of worth and a feeling of one’s own ‘inadequacy’. It is the personal narrative that determines which possibilities a person considers permissible for themselves, and which they consider impossible. The personal layer seems the most ‘mine’, but in reality it is rarely completely autonomous.
Familial narrative comprises the stories transmitted not so much through words as through intonations, reactions, and prohibitions. These are phrases a person has heard since childhood: ‘In our family, it’s not done…', ‘In our family, everyone is…', ‘Be more modest,’ ‘Don’t stick out,’ ‘People can’t be trusted,’ ‘Love must be earned.’
The family is a mini-state with its own ideology. And even if a person rationally disagrees with it, their reactions often continue to follow precisely this script.
Familial narratives shape automatic strategies: endurance, conflict avoidance, hyper-responsibility, readiness to help, wariness, workaholism. A person can live for years with these reactions, unaware that they are not their ‘character’, but an inherited story.
Social layer comprises the stories of one’s environment, profession, generation, city, social circle. It is the story of ‘how things are for people.’ How one is supposed to build a career. What ‘normal’ relationships look like. What is considered success. What one should be ashamed of.
The social layer creates the frame of the permissible. It imperceptibly answers the question: ‘Is it even possible to live like that?’
Often a person is internally ready for change, but the social narrative holds them in the old story: ‘That’s not how it’s done,’ ‘That’s not serious,’ ‘You’re too old for that.’
Cultural layer is the broadest and most elusive.
This is the historical plot of a country or civilisation. It sets the basic model of the relationship between a person and the world: the world as opportunity or threat, the world as a field of freedom or a field of duty, the world as a space for creativity or survival.
The cultural layer manifests itself quietly but powerfully. It is rarely conscious, but it is this layer that forms the deep sense of ‘how life is generally structured.’
Working with narrative is impossible without recognising all levels.
Changing only the personal plot is rarely sustainable if the familial or cultural layer remains unchanged.
How a Personal Narrative is Formed: Three Sources
A person does not invent a story from a vacuum. They inherit it, absorb it, and construct it.
– Biographical experience. Biography is the most obvious source, but not the most direct. Facts themselves do not become a story. They pass through filters of emotion, self-esteem, family scenarios, and cultural expectations. The same event can give rise to different lives. A teenage rejection can become the story: ‘I’m uninteresting’ or ‘I’ll learn to be strong.’ Unfair criticism can turn into ‘I’m not good enough’ or ‘I’ll be more careful about who I trust.’ Events are neutral. Interpretation is not. We are born without a story. But by the age of twenty, most people already have a fundamental narrative that is perceived as ‘objective reality’.
– Family stories. Family narratives are rarely spoken directly. They live in reactions, intonations, prohibitions, and expectations. Parents’ phrases become the inner voice of the adult. Even if they disagree with them, they often continue to act as if they are true.
– Cultural and national narratives. Culture is a factory of stories. France lives within narratives of freedom, dignity, intellectual authorship, style, and civic responsibility. The unspoken demand is: ‘Be yourself – and do it beautifully.’ An American grows up in a story of opportunity: ‘anything is possible.’ A Japanese person grows up in a story of duty: ‘do not let others down.’ A Russian person grows up in a story of survival and overcoming. These plots take root in the personality more deeply than school or books.
Narrative as a Mechanism for Action
The most important thing: a person does not act in accordance with reality, but in accordance with the story they believe to be reality. Behaviour always confirms the narrative. And until this story is recognised in its layers, it will reproduce itself – even contrary to facts.